Gorman: Beware the Hive Mind, Find Reputable Sources
Jennifer Pinkowski -- Library Journal, 06/20/2007
In the age of the Internet, everyone's an expert, complains Michael Gorman, the 2005-2006 president of the American Library Association, but few actually have the credits to back it up—and now Gorman's blogging his critique. Gorman famously made similar charges in print, in a 2004 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, "Google and God's Mind," and then an essay in Library Journal in which he harshly criticized bloggers' responses to his op-ed and notoriously called blogs forums for "the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar...."
No, Gorman—who last year retired as dean of the library at California State University, Fresno—hasn't set up a blog of his own but rather has joined for the Web 2.0 Forum of the Encyclopedia Britannica Blog. He writes, in the first installment of a series of three essays, that the "the task before us is to extend into the digital world the virtues of authenticity, expertise, and scholarly apparatus that have evolved over the 500 years of print, virtues often absent in the manuscript age that preceded print." Essentially, Gorman fears that we are moving away from an encyclopedia model of knowledge, which he describes as "the product of many minds," to a Wikipedia one, the product of a "hive mind." The latter, he writes in "The Sleep of Reason: Part II," "is a direct assault on the tradition of individualism in scholarship."
Gorman is one of about 80 contributors to the Britannica Blog. He was asked to weigh in because of his unique take on "the current state of intellectual life, culture, and the Internet," according to Tom Panelas, a Britannica spokesman. (Panelas wouldn't say which contributors are paid.) "It was a critical perspective you just didn't see very often, at least not in media outlets aimed at general readers." Britannica Blog's editors have sought formal responses to Gorman's postings, including Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Clay Shirky, a professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and author of the upcoming Here Comes Everybody.
While some contributors, such as Gregory McNamee, a contributing editor for Encyclopedia Britannica, echoed Gorman's concerns about users of all-access sources such as Wikipedia, others challenged his thesis. Matthew Battles, author of Library: An Unquiet History, seemed to find Gorman's pro-authority argument to itself be dangerous. Dozens of readers, meanwhile, have commented on Gorman's essays, with many supportive, though others find irony in Gorman's choice of mode. Librarian/blogger Meredith Farkas likened Gorman to Eric Cartman, South Park's resident despot in short pants, whose motto is "Respect My Authority!" She then offered a more serious critique. Equally irreverent is librarian David Lee King's musical response in which he sets phrases from Gorman's blogs to song.
In yesterday's installment, "The Siren Song of the Internet: Part II," Gorman writes that the Internet's "solid and reputable sources," many of them fee-based, are lost in the glut of link-rich free sources that search engines generally return. Until such reputable and reliable information becomes accessible, he writes, "we may well be raising a generation of screen potatoes who, blinded by speed and made lazy by convenience, are ignorant of the knowledge they will never acquire and the rich world of learning that search engines cannot currently deliver to them." Look for one more Gorman essay delivered in two parts before June 29.
